World Cup puts a damper on Rio’s prostitution business

Sex workers wearing the colors of Brazil’s soccer team play pool as they watch the World Cup quarterfinal match between Brazil and Colombia at a bar in the Vila Mimosa area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 4. AP Photo/Leo Correa

RIO DE JANEIRO — It would seem to be the most common sense conclusion: hundreds of thousands of tourists, overwhelmingly male, come to the famously sensual city of Rio de Janeiro, where the women wear tiny bikinis and prostitution is legal. Sex work, therefore, must be booming during the World Cup.

A team of academic researchers, including men and women both foreign and Brazilian, decided to test that hypothesis. Their results so far have echoed what sex workers themselves are saying: The month-long tournament has hardly been the mundial of prostitution.

A 24-year-old prostitute, whose working name is Luna Ferrari, said she left her job as a massage therapist in the high-end neighborhood Barra to try her luck amongst the expected influx of foreign tourists in Copacabana to pay off debts. Ferrari, like many women involved in the research, asked to not give their full names, often saying their families do not know about their profession.

She said the World Cup has hardly been the boom she hoped for, and that many tourists have come from Latin American countries with weak currencies and haggle over prices lower than what a Brazilian would pay. “The tourists have even less money than we have,” she said dryly.

Through some 2,000 hours of ethnographic research, the academic team from the Observatory of Prostitution, which is affiliated with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, has mapped out 279 sex venues in Rio. Only 16 have seen an increase in business during the sporting event, the researchers said. They had also looked for evidence of women migrating or being trafficked to Rio for the mega-event, and said the only migration they see are of prostitutes relocating to Copacabana from other work sites in the city. The research also encompasses gay sex workers.

Researchers conduct much of their field work by chatting with sex workers and brothel owners late into the night and strolling Rio’s red light districts, making them hardly distinguishable from the numerous tourists doing just the same thing. Foreign men in their countries’ jerseys, cargo shorts and fanny packs mingle in the Copacabana streets with women in tight Brazil national team dresses and heels, often drinking beer and smoking on the city sidewalks in no apparent hurry to pick up a woman.

Rio’s most prominent red light districts are in tourist-hub Copacabana and in the city’s downtown and nearby North Zone neighborhoods, where a large number of workers transit in and out each day.

A sex worker wearing a Brazil soccer jersey celebrates a goal by Brazil on a pole used for pole dancing as she watches the World Cup quarterfinal match between Brazil and Colombia in the Vila Mimosa area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 4. Brazil won 2-1. AP Photo/Leo Correa

Prostitution overall has taken a hit in Rio since what Observatory anthropologist Thaddeus Blanchette called “the golden years” of sex tourism between 1998 and 2005, in part due to the global recession and the declining strength of foreign currencies against the real. In 2003, the dollar fetched 3.5 reais; in recent years, the dollar dropped to under two reais. Blanchette estimates that the number of sex tourists in Rio has been cut in half since the beginning of the millenium.

In the boom years, “you would even see frat boys on spring break in Copacabana,” said Blanchette. When the dollar was high against the real, he said, everyone – both prostitutes and clients – felt like they were getting “a good deal.”

Whereas a foreigner may pay $100 for an hour-long programa (sexual interaction), the lion’s share of Rio’s sex establishments are geared toward Brazilian workers, charging as low as 20 reais, or $9 USD, for 10 minutes.

Those sex establishments – downtown spas and massage parlours, which researchers compare to Roman bath houses – have suffered greatly during the World Cup, given the high number of holidays and altered work schedules here. On July 4, the first Friday after payday and generally a day of high demand, Blanchette counted 18 sex establishments closed of about 25 visited and said the few that were open had only a trickle of customers.

The slow movement in brothels is coupled with what Blanchette calls the “privatization” of sex work – prostitutes finding clients discreetly online or sex workers using online dating apps like Tinder.

The business of prostitution operates in tricky legal grounds here. An adult accepting money for sex is legal, but for a third party to benefit from the transaction, such as a brothel owner or a pimp, is illegal. On the opening day of the World Cup, authorities shut down a bar called Balcony on the Copacabana beach, in sight of the FIFA Fan Fest, which they said they are investigating for child abuse. However, no one from the bar has been arrested yet, and prostitution advocates accuse authorities of creating a moralistic image campaign to garner positive media attention before the tournament.

Blanchette, the anthropologist, said foreign clients divide broadly between two categories. The first are intentional sex tourists, who come to Brazil looking to pay for programas and often what Blanchette calls “girlfriend experience” (a date night out with a woman). The second group are what he calls the “accidental sex tourist,” men who expect to have easy one-night-stands but find Brazilian women to be more conservative than expected and instead head to brothels.

A given country’s own culture of prostitution may affect how willing a foreign tourist is to pick up a sex worker while on vacation, said Laura Murray, a filmmaker and PhD student who studies sex work. She observed that many Latin American tourists could be seen leisurely chatting with prostitutes, since the culture here is more similar to their home countries, whereas Americans were more likely to see sex workers as dangerous and scary.

As she studied a Copacabana plaza where sex workers were concentrated, a loud man exclaimed in English how impressed he was to see prostitutes next to families eating dinner, yelling, “I’d take all of my friends to see it!”

A group of Texan men drank beer and eyed prostitutes at the same plaza on a recent night. “You definitely don’t see this in the United States,” said one of the men, who declined to give his name, referring to how publicly sex workers displayed themselves and interacted with clients. Still, he added that he didn’t think there was need to repress the profession. “I think it should be legal. Look,” he said, indicating to the dozens of men in the plaza, “there are a lot of men who want to be satisfied.”

Blanchette interprets the lack of a boom in foreign sex tourists to the idea that World Cup fans already have plenty of occasions to “practice masculinity” when they drink and watch sports together. Many are content with just that, he said. “Lads’ culture doesn’t really need a trip to the whorehouse,” said Blanchette. “You don’t need more whipped cream on top of whipped cream.”